It's pretty much established how
legendary John Carpenter is in genre
cinema, so there's little point in overturning heavily covered ground already. What's
worth repeating, especially as I view his late seventies and early eighties
work, is the importance of how classic Hollywood cinema has influenced his
work. His later work, such as The Ward
(2010), is immensely bland but the golden period which he is beloved for is
heavily indebted to slow, atmospheric world building usually pictured by Dean Cundey and carefully managed to
pull a viewer into the stories. The first ten minutes of The Fog are completely alien to how most modern horror films set
themselves up, particularly its 2005 remake which still haunts me for years
onwards for other reasons; a ghost story on a beach establishing the plot,
about the ghosts of men wrecked at sea getting their revenge on a coastal town,
followed by snatches of different characters going about going about their lives
as a series of ghostly circumstances take place at the witching hour. It's the hundredth
university of the town and from this night onward through the film, a
supernatural fog envelops the region and anyone caught within its prescience is
under threat from the ghosts within it.

The film altogether has the tone
of a short ghost story in its simple, sharp sense of forboding. Despite a
complicated production history involving additional material being shot and the
spectre of gorier horror movies of the time possessing it in places, the resulting
film feels expertly put together as a classic chiller, bolstered by its short
running time and the incredible sense of mood which sends shivers down one's
spine. As with Jaws (1975) the
coastal town both evokes a quaint and peaceful community with rich personality
but also fears of the unknown connected to the sea, ancient lore of the ghosts
of the shipwrecked in this case where the malevolent figures, with their
shrouded faces and ragged clothes, evoke more the Knight Templers of the Tombs of the Blind Dead films from
Spain than the ghosts that would appear over the decades from the eighties. Were
it not for the brief moments of gristly death, aspects of the new slasher films
Friday the 13th (1980) would bring
in appearing in characters trying to escape the ghosts, than The Fog would entirely by closer to the
films of Val Lewton, drenched in the
environments of fog shrouded sea banks as easy listening jazz plays on late
night community radio.

The cast as well adds to the class
of the film. There's probably too many characters, meaning the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis as a young free spirit
doesn't get as much as she deserves in screen time, but having even small
characters like the priest Father Malone played by someone like Hal Holbrook who can add gravitas to
exposition is a virtue a lot of horror films would actually benefit from. Curtis, her own mother Janet Leigh as the wife of the town
major Kathy Williams , Tom Atkins as
the male hero, and people from Nancy
Loomis to Holbrook all raise the
bar by being interesting in their appearances. The individual who stands out
the most, with the most screen time and with a role delicately written for her,
is Adrienne Barbeau; exceptionally
beautiful, and her voice as the radio host havig been canonised by horror fans,
she is also completely believable as a single mother who, in the midst of this
supernatural fog, has to turn her concerns in protecting her young son. A
simple character as the mother fearful of harm to her son not turned into
merely one note but, for a straightforward ghost story, done with character to
it , an example like with the best of short form storytelling that simplistic
characters don't have to be one dimensional but sympathetic.

In general the reason why The Fog stands out as well as it is,
like Halloween (1978) to The Thing (1982), is due to the high
standard of quality felt in the film. It explains why the likes of Village of the Damned (1995) are so
lifeless in that, closer to his idols of classic Hollywood cinema, Carpenter even though he innovated and
was part of the more explicit horror and action genres of the seventies onwards
had feet firmly entrenched in the past where the importance of character actors
and production style were incredibly important. The result of this, like other
American directors who innovated in the seventies but were firmly influenced by
older cinema, is that he's able to bring the best of classic Hollywood cinema
but invest it with new ideas to create visceral and moody films like The Fog.

No comments:

Post a Comment

"I could go on for hours with more examples. The list is endless. You probably never gave it a thought, but all great films, without exception, contain an important element of no reason. And you know why? Because life itself is filled with no reason." - Rubber (2010)

About Me

I am 28 years old and hail from England. For the last few years I have been a growing fan of cinema and have decided to take the next step into blogging about it and any other tangents that about the things I'm interested in I get onto.